Collections Policy
Purpose
The DeWitt Wallace Library’s general collection supports the current curricular and research information needs of our students, faculty, and staff. We also aim to support the personal, social, and extra-curricular needs for all in our community as the budget permits. Library staff partner with Macalester faculty, staff, and students to cultivate diverse, sustainable, and patron-centered collections that support the Library’s mission, vision, and commitments. The guidelines and strategies within this policy outline the approach taken to develop and manage our collections.
Library staff also collect and preserve the scholarship and history of the college. Please visit the Archives, Special Collections and Digital Commons pages for additional details and policies specific to these collections.
Context
Our library exists within an ever-changing information environment influenced by:
- evolving technologies and content delivery models
- evolving socio-cultural environments
- changes in the scholarly publishing landscape
- ongoing budgetary and space constraints
We actively respond to these developments guided by the principles outlined below.
Collection Principles
As we work to create a diverse collection that supports the current curricular and research needs of our students, faculty, and staff, we keep the following principles in mind.
Intellectual Freedom
Our library adheres to the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights and the Intellectual Freedom Principles for Academic Libraries.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility
Per our Library statement on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, the Macalester College library staff “believe strongly in the values of inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility, and the benefits of working in environments that foster and honor a wide array of perspectives, thoughts, experiences, and abilities.” We aim to build a collection that includes a wide spectrum of voices and ideas and prioritize providing access to underrepresented and marginalized perspectives, voices, and viewpoints. We want everyone who visits our physical and virtual spaces to see themselves reflected in the resources we provide and we strive to remove barriers so that all of our resources are available to every member of our community.
We aim for the broadest degree of access to collection materials working within our existing physical and budgetary constraints. Online access is the format of choice when it best meets the needs of patrons. We prioritize vendors providing accessibility features on their content platforms. We recognize that materials in certain disciplines and particular content types may be best accessed in print or physical format. While generally we do not purchase duplicate copies of titles, we encourage patrons to notify us when a different format is needed, and we will work with the patron to best meet their need.
To facilitate access to our collections, patrons may place a hold on collection items through Macalester WorldCat and pick requested items up at the Library service desk.
Library staff strive to align our collection spending with our mission, vision, and commitments. When possible, we purchase collection materials from minority-owned and/or local businesses. We advocate for equitable and transparent pricing and licensing terms. And we support open access initiatives—including new publishing models, infrastructure, and advocacy work—that are working to advance equity within the scholarly publishing landscape and make more academic scholarship free to read and publish. For more details, please see our Open Access LibGuide.
Fiscal Sustainability
We work to maximize the impact of our collection budget, making decisions that preserve both our purchasing power and user access to information. With subscription costs outpacing our budget, we view our support for open access publishing as an essential component of ensuring continued and expanded access to online scholarly content. We prioritize flexibility in our subscriptions, and we regularly review them to ensure their continued value and relevance to our collection.
Responsiveness
Library staff use the following approaches to create responsive collections that support current curricular and research needs within the space and budget we have available to us:
- Subscription Review – Serials and other subscription resources are reviewed annually. Due to budgetary constraints, requests for new subscriptions that are received outside of the annual review cycle are generally held until the next review, and any new subscriptions necessitate cancellations of equal or greater value.
- Collection Review – Collection review and de-selection is a core part of library collection management. As a small college library, we do not have a mission or the ability to keep all materials in perpetuity. Space constraints require that we review and remove materials from the collection in order to make space for new items. Collection review work is ongoing. Reviews can be performed by subject, by format, by collection, or even item-by-item as out of date, irrelevant, or damaged items are discovered. Faculty will be consulted when input is needed in collection review.
Partnerships and Collaborations
We value the partnerships and collaborations we have in place to both build our collections and to expand access to the resources our community has access to.
Collection Selection
Library staff encourage all individuals of the Macalester College community to make purchase request suggestions via the form on the library website or by contacting the library. More formal and strategic collection development is facilitated in partnership with faculty and staff. Each department has a Library Representative who coordinates collection selection for their subject area. They, along with their departmental colleagues, submit orders for materials, are consulted about collection questions and decisions, and help ensure that the collections are reflective of the current needs. Library staff select items to cover subjects more generally, to round out collections, and to address areas of need in the collection.
Library staff also partner with Macalester College Student Government for the Textbook Reserve program. This partnership helps to ensure that all students have affordable access to course materials while they are at Macalester.
Interlibrary Loan
We effectively make use of shared consortial collections and interlibrary loan services to extend the breadth and depth of our collections. We also utilize interlibrary loan data to help inform our collection purchasing decisions, supporting our aim for a responsive collection that meets the current curricular and research needs of our patrons.
Collective Collections
We are committed to and actively engaged in partnerships with libraries and research institutions locally, nationally, and globally to ensure that we are working in collaboration to ensure long-term access to scholarly materials. This includes participation in shared print initiatives as well as membership in organizations such as Center for Research Libraries and HathiTrust. This commitment and these partnerships help us to provide our students, faculty, and staff with a research library experience at Macalester.
Donation of Physical Items
We accept donations of physical items that fall into the following three categories:
- Materials that document the origins, developments, activities, achievements, and people of the College for inclusion in the Archives.
- Unique and rare materials that support the research and curricular needs of the college.
- Publications and works created by Macalester faculty, staff, and alumni.
For further information about donating items that may be of interest to the College Archives and Special Collections, contact Archives staff at: [email protected].
Due to the high cost of storing, reviewing, and processing donations, the library does not accept donations of collection materials outside of these three categories.
Other Options for Donating Items:
Reconsideration Requests
Our library adheres to and supports the Freedom to Read Statement, a joint statement by the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers. We vehemently fight against censorship and champion the right of all to make decisions about what to read.
While we will always lean towards the inclusion of materials regardless of one’s opinion or objection of content, we offer a reconsideration form. Any material reconsideration requests will be handled with the following process:
- Requests will be reviewed by the Associate Library Director for Collection Development & Discovery.
- Requests may be submitted by current Macalester College students, staff, and faculty.
- An individual may submit a reconsideration request for one title per month.
- The Associate Library Director for CD&D will submit a proposal to the Library Director within 15 business days of receiving the reconsideration request.
- The Library Director will make a final decision regarding the request and provide a written response to the challenger within 15 business days after having received the proposal from the Associate Library Director for CD&D.
- The Associate Library Director for CD&D maintains a file of titles that have been through this process, including the date resolved and the final decision.
- Material will continue to circulate until a final decision is made.
Questions that will be considered during the decision-making process include, but are not limited to:
- Does the item support our collection principles in this policy?
- Does the item provide underrepresented and marginalized perspectives, voices, and/or viewpoints?
- For non-fiction titles, is the information in the item factual and accurate?
Questions or inquiries
Questions about these policies or their application should go to the Associate Library Director for Collections, Katy Gabrio ([email protected]).